A banal claim: cinema is largely structured by the interplay of sound and image. Nothing in that claim is worthy of serious contestation. But it is of course worthy of searching, complicated filmmaking. Godard’s most searching work is always, to my mind, obsessed with laying bare the complicated web of relations – in particular, those initiated by the auteur – that generates a sound or an image. The reflection on the assembly-line model (or metaphor?) of cinematic construction that at times overwhelms Ici et ailleurs, complete with alienated workers (images) and exploitative bosses (Godard, Gorin), is at once revealing self-criticism and evidence of the unlimited reach of Marxism’s enduring insights.

But that engagement with sound and image is exclusively about movement and words. It is about an image that speaks, yet, in its speaking, is put at risk by the spatial and temporal frames of cinematic language. The auteur aims the camera and, in the editing room before and after the shot(s), marks the beginning and end of the image sound presence. To the extent that there are allocations of image and sound, speaking is always mixed with the alterity of that which speaks and that in and through which such speaking is facilitated. The image speaks from inside such complicated mixture. How can it be heard?

Godard’s difficult film Comment ça va? (1978), a collaboration with Anne-Marie Miéville, changes the conceptual terrain just a bit. And this “just a bit” comes to mean a lot. Comment ça va? is as much a film to be read as it a film to watch and listen; that is no doubt part of Godard’s aim, to disorient, then reorient us as spectators. The centerpiece of Comment ça va? is a still photograph of a political demonstration. Putting a still photograph in place of moving image and sound is a challenge to Godard in particular, in that the same concerns that dominate Ici et ailleurs and other films (viz., how to represent the Other) are suddenly, and decisively, brought to a halt. The image does not speak, except as a mute presence. Indeed, the muteness of the image – the “stilledness” of the still photograph – forms the obsessive theorizing of Comment ça va? from the outset. Godard’s problem, then, is not with the spatial and temporal limits of the speaking image alone (though they are certainly still there, in slightly different language), but rather now with the ethically saturated muteness of an image. The image draws the auteur’s voice to it, both in the site of Godard’s direction and the characters in the film.

The precursor to this meditation, I would argue, is Godard’s other sustained contemplation of a still-photograph: the short cinematic essay Letter to Jane (1972). In Letter to Jane, Godard (with Jean-Pierre Gorin) contemplated the meaning of a famous photography of Jane Fonda standing with a handful of Viet Cong during a visit to North Vietnam. Godard and Gorin are exceptionally critical of Fonda, as is both well-known and wholly unambiguous, and their polemic is at times as nasty as it is thoughtful. For better or worse. Fonda is characterized as a bourgeois liberal concerned as much (probably more) with the image of radical change as with genuinely material transformation, a claim nicely captured in the fact that she clutches a camera at the moment she discusses ideology – thereby enacting in one photograph the very anxiety about cameras and the oppressed constantly present in Godard’s films from the seventies. History has done little to change Godard’s and Gorin’s assessment of Fonda’s radicalism.

What interests me about this short reflection, a peculiar companion to Tout va bien, is not so much the meaning of its polemic. Or the legitimacy of their reading of the photograph, of “Jane,” and so on. Instead, I am interested in how much talking happens in relation to the photograph and how that sound works on rather than from the image. Such is the nature of the polemic, yes, but that treatment of the photography is also in profound tension with Godard’s own ethics of aesthetic representation. Recall that his 1972 interview – which contrasted his sense of responsibility to that or Marin Karmitz in Coup pour coup – insisted on moving cinema toard “in the service of” and away from the possibility of “to the detriment of,” a movement whose difficulty is the entire burden of the auteur made absolute.

Now, we can certainly understand the difference between Letter to Jane and Comment ça va? on ideological grounds. “Jane” is the bourgeois liberal who puts revolution at risk as the materiality of struggle is made into an image. The radical discourse of the journalist and his political collaborator addresses the opposite movement. Image-making is the pre-geiven against which discourse labors, laboring in Comment ça va? in order to re-render the image into material struggle. This difference is borne by the still-photographs in question: Fonda looks at the Viet Cong, whereas the worker looks into struggle itself, compatriots and enemies at one and the same demonstration. This might suggest that the two films share only the trivial similarity of concern with a still-photograph, and that the real or decisive difference lies only in political judgement. Nevertheless, we can ask a couple of questions that complicate such a distinction. What is the relation between the polemic of Letter to Jane and Godard’s general sense of responsibility to the image itself? Further, if the image always retains the rights – and even outright ability – to speak outside of what is said about it? These are Godard’s own questions in the seventies, so we can assume he asks them of himself after Letter to Jane. Or, at the very least, we can ask those questions of Godard as part of an imagined immanent critique.

Either way, a question haunts any re-viewing of Letter to Jane: what sense are we to make of so much talking? Godard and Gorin dialogue over a cluster of images, all of which return to the central image of Fonda with the Viet Cong. Dialogue over. In that very overlay, there is a violence to the image; the dialogue over the image renders the image for us, as if the photograph’s very meaning is being developed both from within and against the literally developed image, except that in Letter to Jane the “darkroom” figure is the ideological polemic directed against “Jane.”